Table 2: Characteristics of Provincial Linkages between the IRCC-PR database and Provincial Healthcare Registries.

Linkage Province Characteristics	British Columbia	Manitoba	New Brunswick	Ontario
Source IRCC-PR file	National	National	National	Provincial: subset composed of those whose intended destination was Ontario
Period	1985/01/01 to 2012/12/31	1985/01/01 to 2017/12/31	1985/01/01 to 2019/02/05	1985/01/01 to 2017/05/31
Health Care Registry	Provincial	Provincial	Provincial	Provincial
Type of linkage	Country-to-province	Country-to-province	Province-to-province	Province-to-province
Linkage completion date	August 2014	September 2019	December 2019	First linkage: June 2012 Last update: May 2018
Linkage Software	In-house code written in C	LinkPro	Power Query	AutoMatch
Phonetic Algorithm	Jaro-Winkler	Soundex Coding	None, but string name variations	New York State Identification and Intelligence System
Data Quality Assessment	Consistency checks	MCHP Data Evaluation Framework	NB-IRDT Data Quality Framework	ICES Data Quality Framework
Stratification by intended destination	Yes	Yes	No, linkage limited to those intending to settle in the province	No, source file limited to those intending to settle in the province
Immigrant retention rates (2008-2013)*	90.4%	84.3%	63.9%	93.1%

* The percentage of immigrants who arrived between 2008 and 2013 who resided in their province of destination in the 2013 tax year [5].